The Peck School | Morristown, NJ
In northern New Jersey, The Peck School was well-known as a scholastic stronghold and treasure trove of tradition—but remained underappreciated as a seat of academic innovation. Peck’s lively classrooms, fueled by fresh methods and filled with joyful discovery, remained unknown to too many prospective families.
By forging explicit connections between Peck’s timeless traditions and the timely transformation the school elicits in their students, The Peck School now shows how the stability of their community creates a stable space for dynamic learning—and prepares young minds for a rapidly changing world.
Andy Delinsky, Head of School
The Peck School’s philosophy of education has long been rooted in the enduring values of hard work, fair play, strong character, and intellectual curiosity. Likewise, beloved school traditions profoundly shape Peck students’ experiences on their K-8 journey. Community insiders embrace and celebrate these unchanging ethical and cultural touchstones.
However, prospective families, viewing and attempting to decipher this classic culture from the outside, had begun forming an outdated impression of the school’s pedagogy and programming. How could Peck show that the school’s cultural traditions coexist with—and support—a spirit of academic transformation?
Peck’s cherished customs—including tidy blazers and pleated jumpers, a daily handshake with the Head of School, and a field day celebration that has endured for generations—lend structure to students’ days and anchor the atmosphere of the school year after year. But there’s more to Peck than meets the external eye.
Peck also offers an educational experience that constantly evolves. Peck teachers continually update their skill sets, courses and assignments take new shape year by year, and Peck students spend much of their time out of their seats, engaged in hands-on, project-based, collaborative, and technologically mediated learning. The school needed a means of highlighting these fresh approaches to teaching and learning—while simultaneously affirming the stabilizing influence of their enduring values and customs.
Peck insiders are deploying the school’s new shared vocabulary–and, as a result, are now even more effectively and enthusiastically operating as ambassadors to external audiences in Morristown and beyond.
The Peck School needed to make the connections between their storied past and their compelling present clear, concrete, and explicit. To forge these links, CRANE created a series of pairings, twinning a classic educational value (like “inquiry,” for example) with a modifier that signals a fresh approach to envisioning and instilling it. For example, good schools have long prized a spirit of inquiry, but Peck offers inquiry|energized—recasting the traditional academic quest to understand as an exciting, invigorating process of discovery. The metaconcept pairing—timeless traditions | timely transformations—speaks to the overarching effect of this interplay between cultural consistency and academic innovation: Peck graduates emerge steadied by timeless values and dexterous after nine years of dynamic, transformative teaching.
These word pairings work in tandem with typography, patterns, and images to further clarify connections between new and old. Peck’s classic attributes are described in traditional serif fonts, while details about the school’s modern methods are delivered in fresh san serif typeface. Meanwhile, bright and bold photography counterbalances subtle patterns drawn from the classic architecture of Peck’s turn-of-the-century administration building.
The result is a verbal and visual identity for The Peck School that is both rooted in the school’s traditions and reflective of Peck’s continual growth. And now prospective parents and students can grasp this balance and creative tension at first glance.
Since launching this branding effort, the Peck community has rallied around the new messaging, which also gave shape to the trajectory of the school’s current excellence | elevated campaign. Peck insiders are deploying the school’s new shared vocabulary–and, as a result, are now even more effectively and enthusiastically operating as ambassadors to external audiences in Morristown and beyond.
